A LIFE CHRONOLOGY

A Life Chronology

Frederick Perls

Fritz Perls wrote the following as part of his introduction to the 1969
Random House edition of Ego, Hunger and Aggression. For reasons unknown
to us, only the material that followed the chronology actually appeared.
We offer it here exactly as Perls wrote it.

We have inserted photographs taken during Perls's lifetime at the appropriate
location in the text.

JW

1893 Time of birth. Place: Berlin. Mother loving, ambitious. Loving the arts,
hating father. Father hating mother, loving women; also playing grand master
of freemasons; heavy and gay. In public, both friendly. Confusing.

Else, Margariet and Frederick Perls, Germany,
1900.

1903 Bright boy in elementary school; always best without homework. Tested
for high school; never heard of fractions. Dumbfounded. Shock of failure.
Confusing.

1911 Finding my world. Fall in love. Poetry, philosophy, and mostly the theater.
Max Reinhard, founder of modern theater direct with your ears: listen, listen,
listen! Canvas and painted props are out. Three dimensions. Make the stage
real. Turn the world into a stage. What is reality? Confusing.

1922 Starting afresh. Most exciting. We We! I enlarge the non-family world.
We: bohemians, off the beaten path. Actors, painters, writers. Creating a
new world. Bauhaus, Brücke, Dadaism new matter-of-factness movement.
Discover a guru: S. Friedlander (Chapter One) "Creative indifference." Discover
the zero point as center nothingness stretching into opposite somethings.
First time a solid bearing. Groping. And less confused.

Frederick Perls, Berlin, 1923

1925 Started seven years of useless couch life. Felt I was stupid. Finally,
Wilhelm Reich, then still sane, made some sense. Also Karen Horney, whom
I loved. The rest opinionated imitators, misspelling Freud's good intentions.
Confusing.

1930 Marriage. Later two children, four grandchildren. Sideline. No square
husband. Wife Laura involved in expressive movement - Gindler. No integration
yet of soma and psyche. Mind-body relationship still confusing.

1934 An early refugee from the Hitler regime. Still deeply involved in orthodox
analysis, I go to teach Freud's gospel in South Africa. Still confused.

1936 Went to Marienbad for Freudian congress. First paper: "Oral resistances."
Rejected. "Resistances are always anal." !!! Resentful. First break with
the orthodox ones. Turmoil of confusion, but a center of sureness is born:
"I know better." What? Me know better than the Gods? Yes, yes, yes! I can
see; they are half-blind. Not as blind as the materialists and the spiritualists,
but they too have prejudices galore. Perhaps one day I will find the truth.
Yes pompous thought the truth!

1937 Back in South Africa. Struggle to get out of the quicksand of free
associations. Fall back on Goldstein's organism-as-a-whole approach. Still
too narrow. Our Prime Minister, Jan Smuts, has the answer: ecology.
Organism-as-a-whole-embedded-in-environment. This becomes the Unit. The
objective-subjective identity is born. Freud's catharsis notion is the emerging
Gestalt. Not in the Unconscious, but right on the surface. The obvious is
put on the throne. The neurotic is a person who is blind to the obvious.

1940 I am teaching myself touch typing, slowly getting bored. Why not let
thoughts flow onto sheets of paper? Doing so, I discover idea after idea.
Chapter after chapter forms itself. Concepts I had assimilated, objections
I had discarded. A new approach to man in his health and plight emerged.
I ceased to be an analyst. I understood aggression not a mystical energy
born out of Thanatos, but a tool for survival. Concepts such as reflexes
(stimulus-response) and instincts as stable properties became obsolete, tumbled
down, making room for a new perspective, although still in dominance today.
Mechanical, causal thinking of the last century had to give way to process,
structure, and function to the thinking of an electronic age. The "how" replaces
the "why." Perspective and orientation supersede rationalization and guesswork.
Even the "I" (and to Freud the Ego is "I", and not a concept of self) is
dissolved into identification function. (Part II, Chapter 7)

1941 The book is finished. To revise and edit, or let it stand as it is?
No. Let it be. It has many faults, my English is often clumsy, the examples
badly chosen but it is "me." My confusion begins to lift, but still, often,
I am depressed and confused until an idea emerges clearly and solidly.

The theme of Ego, Hunger, and Aggression must be unacceptable to Freud, for
it leads to assimilation. Foreign material becomes a part of the Self and
its growth. Freud's Ego idiom is the accumulation of parts: introjections
(Part II, Chapter Five and Seven). Traceable, analyzable. But assimilation
is integration. Insufficiently applied aggression at the input stage (hunger)
and destructuring (destroying, grinding down, preparing for making one's
own) of external mental and physical food, prevents maturation and becoming
"self." The idea of assimilation undermines Freud's model of the structure
of man, mainly the Super-Ego Ego instinct relationship, and his lopsided
view of life as the Eros-Thanatos struggle. Psychoanalysis turns out to be
a closed, unchanged and unchangeable system, full of explanatariness but
missing self-evident understanding. Psychoanalysis is an illness that pretends
to be a cure. Unsuccessful treatments, from three to over twenty years, far
outweigh the scant success.

I am less confused. I begin to see. But many problems remain.

Reading a Newspaper in South Africa, ca. 1940

1942 First publication of this book in Durban, South Africa. Good reviews,
but not much sale. Show the book to Maria Bonaparte, a friend of Freud. Result:
"If you don't believe (!!!) in the libido theory any more, you had better
hand in your resignation." Libido theory a matter of faith? I can hardly
trust my ears. But, smugly jeering at that silly, unscientific pronouncement,
I accept the break and fizzle out.

Enter the army as a psychiatrist. Here, psychoanalysis is a white elephant.
Still, psychotherapy has its place. At first, the internists say: Behind
every neurosis is a stomach ulcer. But in the end they say: Perls, you are
right. Behind the ulcer is the neurosis.

Frederick Perls in the Uniform of the South African
Army, 1944

1946 Discharged from the army, I go to the States. Allen & Unwin publishes
the book. Premature again: not much response.

1950 The awareness theory crystallizes itself. Coin the term Gestalt Therapy.
Design experiments relating to the topology of awareness to the mix-up of
self and world awareness. Gestalt Therapy with R. Hefferline and P. Goodman
as co-authors appears as a book. Jeered at by the academic Gestalt psychologists.
But Gestalt Therapy is no fly-by-night. Sales increase from year to year.

Existential psychiatry, too, turns out to be disappointing. Too much verbiage
and too many concepts.

1962 Existence: a rose is a rose is a rose. The experienced phenomenon as
the ultimate Gestalt!! Not religion-oriented like Buber, Tillich and Marcel;
not language-oriented like Heidegger; not communist-oriented like Sartre;
not psychoanalytically oriented like Binswinger

Where is the non-verbal?

Study some Zen in Japan. Disappointing too.

1964 I join Esalen Institute. What the Bauhaus was in Germany for the creation
of a new style in architecture and the arts, Esalen is as a practical center
of the third wave of humanistic psychology.

1966 Gestalt Therapy begins to be known all over the States. Have we come
to fill the existing void after psychoanalysis and existentialism? Can we
deliver the goods? Are we here to stay?

"Fritz" Perls on His First Visit to the Esalen Institute
in 1964

The View of the Big Sur Mountains from the Stage at
the Big Sur Folk Festival Held at Esalen in 1967